Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchMedical and Nonmedical Use of Prescription Stimulants: Results From a National Multicohort Study
Section snippets
Study Design
The Monitoring the Future (MTF) study annually surveys a cross-sectional, nationally representative sample of high school seniors in approximately 127 public and private schools in the contiguous U.S., using self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaires in classrooms. The samples analyzed in this study consisted of high school seniors from 2 independent cohorts (senior years 2010 and 2011), and the MTF study used a multistage sampling procedure in each year. In stage 1, geographic areas (or
Prevalence of Medical and Nonmedical Use of Prescription Stimulants
Approximately 15.5% of high school seniors in the United States had some lifetime exposure to prescription stimulants, either medically or nonmedically. The estimated prevalence of lifetime medical use of prescription stimulants among high school seniors was 9.5%, and the lifetime nonmedical use of prescription stimulants was also 9.5%. Overall, 84.6% reported no lifetime medical or nonmedical use of prescription stimulants, 5.6% medical use only, 2.2% medical use before nonmedical use, 1.7%
Discussion
This is the first national study to assess the lifetime prevalence of medical and nonmedical use of prescription stimulants and the relationships with substance use behaviors in the United States. The results indicate that nearly 1 in every 6 high school seniors in the United States had some lifetime exposure to prescription stimulants either medically or nonmedically in 2010 and 2011. The lifetime prevalence rates of nonmedical use of prescription stimulants in the present study were higher
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Cited by (0)
This article is discussed in an editorial by Dr. Yifrah Kaminer on page 1255.
The development of this manuscript was supported by research grants R01 DA024678 and R01 DA031160 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Drug Abuse or the National Institutes of Health. The Monitoring the Future data were collected by a research grant R01 DA01411 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health.
Dr. West served as the statistical expert for this research.
The authors would like to thank the respondents and school personnel for their participation in the study. The authors would like to thank the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive for providing access to these data and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article.
Disclosure: Drs. McCabe and West report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.